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This year’s Stafettkarneval has began at the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki. The athletics competition is contested by teams representing Swedish-speaking schools across Finland. It is organised by Svenska Finlands Skolidrottsförbund -School Athletics Association of Swedish Finland (SFSI).

The event was first held in 1961, being the idea of Carl-Olof Holmén who had taken part as part of the University of Deleware’s team in the 1960 Penn Relay in USA. This event was to inspire Holmén who was enthused by this experience and thus established a similar event for Swedish speaking Finland once he became the chairman of SFSI later in that same year.

In the first competition in 1961 at Djurgården’s sportfield, 601 runners took part. Already that made it the largest ever school sports competition in Swedish speaking Finland. By the following year, there were already over 1000 competitions. By its third, the competitor count passed 1 500. The event had grown so much, that by only its fourth year it moved venues to the Olympic Stadium. This has been the home of Stafettkarnevalen ever since - with the exception of during four years where the event took place in Vasa or Karleby due to renovation work at the Olympic Stadium.

The number of competitors has continued to rise. In recent years, Stafettkarnevalen has become the biggest annual school athletics competition in the whole of Europe, with more than 10 000 entrants.

The 100 000 euro costs of staging the competition are met by sponsors. All officials and management teams are unpaid.

2008’s event sees a record number of starters - 10 228. The President of the Republic, Tarja Halonen, will attend day 2 of the event tomorrow.

You can follow the competition live via Radio X3M and a television highlights programme will be transmitted on FST5 on Tuesday at 21.00. All the results are also available via the competition’s official website: www.stafettkarnevalen.fi/resultat

Finland beat Sweden 4-0 in the bronze medal match at the World Icehockey Championships in Canada last night. It’s great that Finland take away a medal from the tournament after widely being tipped to perform badly at this event. And I must admit, it always feels good to beat the Swedes!

Finland’s goal tender Niklas Bäckström played an exceptionally good game. The shots on goal statistics back that up. The Swedes had 36 shots on goal against our 13. However, Bäckström’s performance meant Sweden came away scoreless.  Antti Pihlström (who played a great game) scored twice for Finland. Janne Niskala and Mikko Koivu were the other Finnish goal scorers.

The game was the last for Teemu Selänne in the Finnish national team after 124 appearances.

Finnish politicians, or at least those in the governing coalition, appear to be split on whether or not they should boycott the summer olympic games in Beijing.

Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen (centre party) has made it clear that he will attend the opening ceremony and stay for a few days to watch events with Finns competing in them. He made it clear that he thought that Olympics is a sporting event and not a political one. Vanhanen’s decision has been criticised by all of the candidates for the chairmanship of the opposition SDP. Although, interestingly, it seems that President Tarja Halonen (who is a nominal social democrat, although Finnish presidents resign party membership when elected) will attend.

The Minister of Culture and Sport Stefan Wallin (Swedish peoples’ party Sfp) has made it clear that he will be on his summer holiday during the period of the Olympics, with no further comment, clearly trying to avoid entering into the controversy.

Today, in a prominent difference of opinion with the prime minister, the foreign minister Alexander Stubb (coalition party Kokoomus) said that he wouldn’t attend if he were invited. He did say he thought it would be ok to participate if China began negotiations with the exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama. Clearly, Stubb does not share Vanhanen’s opinion that the olympics is just a sporting event.

From both the statements and the actions of the Chinese government, it’s hard to see how the games are removed from politics. The Chinese domestic media’s coverage of the worldwide torch relay has clear propaganda undertones, with the protests that dogged the torch’s progress in places like London, Paris and San Francisco glossed over and choice pictures of the flame with dignitaries emphasised (and often the only pictures shown). The Chinese government were probably hoping to use the Beijing Olympics as the ultimate propaganda tool - a way to make China look great and impressive on the world stage and show their own people that China is popular abroad, with world leaders there sharing in China’s achievement. Their plans for this have horribly back-fired, with it instead focusing the world’s gaze towards China’s human rights abuses. It’s hard not to imagine the Communist party’s top officials cursing over ever applying to host them.

Sport, ideally, should be apolitical. It would be grossly unfair to prevent the athletes from attending and competing at the games. After all, many of them will have spent the entirity of the last 4 years (if not longer) preparing for olympic competition. It would be cruel to deprive them of their chance to compete. However, politicians do not need to be at a sporting event for it to take place. In fact, politicians - who are, to state the obvious, political in nature - give the event a political aspect by their very attendance. People like Vanhanen and Halonen are, after all, not going as private people to spectate. They’re going to represent Finland by virtue of their political roles. So, it’s rather rich for them to suggest there’s nothing political about the games in that context. Thus, I do think they should reconsider their decisions to go. They can send a message to the Chinese regime that they will not endorse a country which is grossly violating human rights by staying at home. Better still, they can use the Olympics as leverage. Tell China they’ll come - but only if China improves its human rights situation markedly and starts talking to the Dalai Lama. This event might be the only opportunity the rest of the world has this much leverage over China for a long time. Perhaps our politicians use take it.

None of the Nordic countries’ prime ministers are ready to boycott the summer Olympics in China.

“I’ll make my decision in the summer but I’m likely to take part in the opening ceremony” said Finnish prime minister Matti Vanhanen (centre) from Sweden.

None of his colleagues are planning to travel to Beijing but the Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen underlines that this shouldn’t be seen as a political position, “I didn’t take part in the opening ceremony in Greece either”

The Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg commented that one should never say never but was extremely doubtful that a boycott would have the desired effect, “Even the Dalai Lama isn’t calling for a boycott”.

The prime ministers are taking part in the Nordic Globalisation Forum in Riksgränsen in Sweden. The host is the Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who also has firmly rejected the idea of a boycott, “Sweden shall not boycott the Olympic games, neither opening ceremony nor any other aspect”.

Reinfeldt has come under a lot of criticism during the last few weeks, particularly from the Swedish opposition Social Democrats, for his planned official visit to China this coming Saturday.